... . By L. P. HARTLEY. I AM too late to recommend Channel Packet, which has already gone into three impressions; but not too late, I hope, to praise it, rapid as is nowadays the dis appearance of any book which endears itself to the public. One's reasons for liking a book do not always really explain why one likes it one may like it as one likes a person, for some temperamental affinity or a ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THERE is a bitter pleas ure in turning from Julien Duvi vier's new, shining Hollywood epic, Tales of Man hattan, to his old, unostentatious LA FIN DU JOUR. which you can seen at Studio One with French dialogue and English sub-titles. Ea Fin du Jour was the last film Duvivier made before he left the Old World and the life and cinema ne unoerstooo. The present copy has ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. SINCE human nature is always in trigued by a bio graphy, and never more intrigued than by the very private biography of a very public man, the screen obituary was not exhausted when Orson Welles made Citizen Kane. Much the same cinematic pattern has been followed by the producers of the new film at the Empire, KEEPER OF THE FLAME. If the niece isn't auite the towering ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. t HANGMEN ALSO DIE (Tivoli and Marble Arch Pavi lion) tackles a subject that seems a little too big for its autho director, Fritz Lang, and his company of Hollywood artists. This is the story of the search for the assassin of Heydnch, the Hang man of Czechoslovakia, and, more grandiosely, the apotheosis of the soul of the Czech people. The pick of the soul of the Czech ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. TIMES change, as all sorts of writers have snappily observed in all sorts of languages. There was the day when the words All-star Cast on a film bill meant quite simply, as a rule, that there was no star in it worth mentioning. Now it means precisely what it says, and no nonsense. When 1 aramount announces there are fourteen stars in STAR SPANGLED RHYTHM (Plaza), fourteen ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I HAVE been guilty myself, when driven to it by dons and other professorial types, of asserting that the motion- picture camera is the greatest his torian of our times --but then I wasn't thinking of films like FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. Oup children and grandchildren, dropping into some repertory cinema of the future and happening on a revival of this 1943 classic, will ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. SENTIMENTAL journeys are apt to be dangerous, for they are undertaken in a state of emotional excite ment. When Angele Kernahan arrived at her father's Irish home she had but the vaguest idea of whom or what she would find there. An actress, like her french motner, and born and brought up in Paris, she had never been to Ireland before she had come en touriste with some ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. A VERY young scientist I know, a four teen-year-old boy by the name of Smith, has an odd hobby. In all the hours he can spare from dissecting frogs and combining combustible elements, he goes to see Technicolor pictures. He goes to see no other pictures. He does not like pictures. He rarely likes Technicolor pictures. But he studies them gloomily, morosely, in the interests ...

... . By G. A. LEJEUNE. WALT DISNEY, who started his professional career through a mouse whom he met in an office, has become one of America's leading educators for the duration. Educational and propaganda films for the U.S. Government now represent more than three-fourths of the output from the Disney Studios. He is making, or has made, a string of instructional films for the Navy a series for ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. RUNNING to PARA DISE is a novel of escape, though far from being an escapist novel. The hero, Adrian Dormant, rather than wait for his class to be called up in England, joins the French Foreign Legion, and sees much fierce fighting before France signs the Armistice. Most of his friends are killed, and he himself becomes a prisoner of war in German hands. Escaping from ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IN the long run, your verdict on MISSION TO MOSCOW (Warners and Regal) will almost certainly be decided by your political views or the extent of your in formation regarding pre-war European affairs, neither of which is the province of these notes. The controversy surrounding the piece as propaganda is not my affair either, and 1 leave others to decide wnetner tne mm is, ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. RIDE ON, STRANGER is a novel about urban life in Aus tralia in the years just before the war. Shannon Hicks was her parents' fourth daughter; she was born on Monday, a washing-day, and the news of her birth gave her father an attack of indigestion. Any child was bad enough, but a boy would have been prefer able, so rather wistfully they gave her a name that would have ...